How do you define the human conscience?

[fish2plus2]

Logically, it is impossible for me to believe in a Christian God, heaven and hell, a human soul or Karma.

However, I have to admit that one of the reasons I do not do bad things is because a am scared of the consequences.

I do not cheat because I think it is unethical, however whenever I think about cheating, I start thinking that maybe karma is real and that it will come back to haunt me. But really, if my friend told me that he was going to cheat then in no way would it ever occur to me that it would open a door of evil to him or that it would come back to haunt him.

So why is that exactly? Is our conscience a subconscious voice that we do not fully understand? Is it because these ideas about karma/heaven and hell have been ingrained in us since we were little kids? Do we logically reject the idea of heaven and hell in our minds, however feel it in our hearts?

[FluffyTiger]

from an evolutionary perspective, i reckon it makes sense for people to have a sense of right and wrong

i reckon civilizations filled with people who do not have that sense will and have gotten owned by other civilizations. Then it's up to whatever random culture you grew up in to plug the diff ideas into your right slot and wrong slot, but my point is we evolved to have slots.

oh yeah, i reckon we evolved to think logically too. so we don't believe it in our minds (more conscious part of brain) but do in our hearts (more subconscious part)

[Dids]

I'm not sure I believe in a conscience as much as I believe that one of the attribute an animal needs to live is a decent understanding of cause and effect, and since we've got v. good animal brains, we do that at a pretty high level.

[miw210]

Conscience/ethics is a social construction. Our conscience tells us not to cheat on a test because society says cheating is unethical.

[JaBlue]

One take is that conscience is just society's conditioning i.e. you feel bad about doing something "wrong" because as you grew up mommy and daddy repeatedly told you it was bad.

This is probably pretty close to how I feel about it because I imagine that if some person grew up completely isolated from any kind of society, he or she wouldn't have these kinds of feelings.

[george w]

you have a misunderstanding of what karma is. there isn't anything supernatural about it. it is basically just cause and effect. karma means that everything we do has consequences and everything we are experiencing now is the result of past actions. when you talk about good and bad karmic consequences there isn't some moral judgment being passed down by god or the universe or whatever - it just means that an action will either lead you to ultimate happiness (enlightenment) or it will lead you away from it.

for example, stealing creates a bad karmic seed in your mind because it strengthens a feeling of greed which comes out of a false sense of self. the false sense of self is said to be the source of all suffering so anything that strengthens it is going away from enlightenment. and likewise anything that breaks it up (like compassion, generosity, etc) leads toward enlightenment. so doing these things is said to have good karmic consequences.

i'm no expert so take all of this with a grain of salt. the important thing is that there is nothing supernatural about it. karma just describes the natural law that everything that happens is a result of a something else. an interesting consequence of this is that there is no beginning of time. if everything is the result of something else happening then there can be no root cause of everything because something would have had to cause it.

[phish]

Humans are by nature social animals. (People kept in prolonged isolation go insane) And as social animals, we possess traits that would allow us to function and fit in well with others in our group. One of these traits is empathy, which I believe is the basis of 'conscience.'

For most people (those who's empathic instincts are not impaired), the reason we don't do things that we consider 'wrong' is because we subconsciously are able to put ourselves in the position of feeling how the victims would feel.

Now this empathy is, of course, tempered greatly by environmental molding (upbringing, societal norms, etc) and the needs of the situation. We can be very easily brainwashed into doing horrible atrocities by the process of dehumanizing the enemy, which makes the enemy not 'one of us', or even something so opposite or against 'us' that our baser emotions (anger, hate, etc) can overwhelm any normal empathy we may have.

[thirddan]

this seems to me like a use of pascals wager...no need to take chances when you have a second reason (ethics/morals/social outlook)in addition to the logical reason of the wager...

maybe its dumb, but if you are faced with a situation and considering cheating, but you have a problem with it ethically and their is a possibility that karma exists (pascals wager) then there is no reason to do it...